After U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent, ambiguous remarks about the possibility of resuming nuclear testing, one of the country’s oldest security debates feels newly alive—and just as contentious. Deterrence advocates argue that renewed testing could discourage nuclear use amid Chinese and Russian modernization, while disarmament champions counter that any return to testing would undermine global norms, fracture alliances, and accelerate an arms race. Trump’s remarks did not create this rift, but they bring a deeper problem into sharp relief—the fact that, 80 years into the nuclear age, experts still disagree on a deceptively simple question: Do nuclear weapons make us safer or less secure?
The divide between nuclear policy camps is not just ideological; it is epistemic. Competing factions rely on different logics and ideas about what constitutes “safety.” For the camp rooted in deterrence theory, the absence of nuclear war itself is proof that deterrence works and that nuclear weapons keep us safe. For the opposing bloc—more aligned with arms control and disarmament traditions—eight decades of nonuse are evidence of luck, not stability. Nuclear weapons are an inherent hazard, they argue; deterrence a brittle equilibrium sustained by contingency rather than design.
After U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent, ambiguous remarks about the possibility of resuming nuclear testing, one of the country’s oldest security debates feels newly alive—and just as contentious. Deterrence advocates argue that renewed testing could discourage nuclear use amid Chinese and Russian modernization, while disarmament champions counter that any return to testing would undermine global norms, fracture alliances, and accelerate an arms race. Trump’s remarks did not create this rift, but they bring a deeper problem into sharp relief—the fact that, 80 years into the nuclear age, experts still disagree on a deceptively simple question: Do nuclear weapons make us safer or less secure?
The divide between nuclear policy camps is not just ideological; it is epistemic. Competing factions rely on different logics and ideas about what constitutes “safety.” For the camp rooted in deterrence theory, the absence of nuclear war itself is proof that deterrence works and that nuclear weapons keep us safe. For the opposing bloc—more aligned with arms control and disarmament traditions—eight decades of nonuse are evidence of luck, not stability. Nuclear weapons are an inherent hazard, they argue; deterrence a brittle equilibrium sustained by contingency rather than design.
As great-power tensions rise and nuclear modernization accelerates, discussions in the field run on parallel tracks, unable to mobilize significant public or political attention. This is evident in today’s polarized debate over whether the United States should deploy a new nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile, or SLCM-N. Advocates view the weapon as a credible, flexible deterrent to new threats, while critics view it as a destabilizing step toward a more dangerous, offense-heavy arsenal. Yet both claim the mantle of “strategic stability,” insisting their logic and prescribed path best serve peace. (Meanwhile, the general public has never heard of the SLCM-N.)
To move forward, the field must learn from other sectors that have found ways to act amid deep disagreement. The domains of climate governance, artificial intelligence policy, and global health are all marked by uncertainty, value conflict, and divergent worldviews. Yet these communities have learned to transform disagreement into frameworks for collective action—even if temporarily. Their success suggests that progress does not necessarily require consensus but shared reference points and a willingness to engage across differences. For nuclear policy, that means developing common baselines that can shape decisions about the SLCM-N and other future nuclear developments. By reclaiming key terms as boundary concepts, building integrated institutions, and confronting its attention deficit, the nuclear policy field can overcome its epistemic and ideological fissures.
Other sectors have built effective policy frameworks even when basic philosophies diverge, albeit to varying degrees of success. In climate policy, economists, scientists, and activists have long clashed over strategy—carbon pricing versus regulation, green growth versus degrowth. Yet despite internal debates, the climate science community shares a coherent problem frame: Climate change is real, human-driven, and urgent. Institutions such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) convert scientific disagreement into consensus-based reports, which include confidence intervals to signal areas of uncertainty. These reports provide policymakers with trusted guidance even as research and modeling continue to evolve.
AI governance experts remain divided across fundamentally different risk horizons. One camp focuses on near-term, empirically observable harms such as model bias, system reliability, and data governance; another faction emphasizes long-term alignment failures and existential risks. These groups operated in parallel for much of the last 10 years until the term “AI safety” began to serve as a bridge around 2021. Its conceptual flexibility allowed researchers to work under a shared mandate to “make AI systems safer,” even if they operated with incompatible risk models. Joint efforts by integrated institutions such as the U.K. AI Safety Institute and the U.S. AI Consortium helped establish common evaluation practices, red-teaming methods, and reliability benchmarks, providing governments with a single entry point into the debate. Although current, rapid shifts toward frontier model development and artificial general intelligence have begun to marginalize parts of the safety community and weaken prior cross-camp alignment, this brief convergence demonstrates the possibility of unification.
In the public health domain, urgency has helped bridge epistemic divides. During the COVID-19 pandemic, economists, ethicists, and epidemiologists disagreed on the trade-offs between liberty and precaution, but they converged long enough to act, coordinating the rapid development and global rollout of vaccines through efforts such as COVAX. Shared epidemiological data, trusted institutions, and real-time feedback sustained a temporary consensus, even if new fractures have emerged since with the rise of the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda and U.S. efforts to roll back funding for global public health initiatives.
While these efforts weren’t bulletproof, nuclear policy has a responsibility to at least try to apply these lessons. This does not mean either relinquishing disarmament or enshrining deterrence as dogma but focusing on an actionable middle ground where objectives overlap. As nuclear policy experts Vipin Narang and Pranay Vaddi noted recently, navigating a tripolar nuclear world—in which China, Russia, and the United States expand arsenals amid eroding arms control—will require smarter and more resilient approaches to risk reduction.
Across the nuclear policy spectrum, there is a consensus on several key aims: preventing nuclear use; reducing miscalculation in crisis situations; avoiding arms racing and brinkmanship; ensuring the security of arsenals, technologies, and materials; and upholding norms of nonuse.
In short, while strategies and rationales differ, the goals—preventing war, managing escalation, and sustaining the nuclear taboo—largely align. To prevent these shared aims from becoming obscured by binary fissures, debates around issues such as the SLCM-N must be evaluated through a pluralistic framework, asking not whether the system validates deterrence hawks or disarmament advocates but under which conditions deployment reduces or increases escalation risks and strengthens or erodes alliance cohesion.
The nuclear policy field would also benefit from its own “IPCC moment”: a systematic, cross-community process that could map disagreement, clarify uncertainty, and surface common ground. First, key terms that currently exist as doctrinal flags must be transformed into flexible anchors for dialogue. For example, the term “strategic stability” is currently used by both deterrence and disarmament camps to reflect divergent logic, but the core dimensions of the term are already shared across expert communities—generally suggesting the ability to manage crises without unintended escalation, restraint in competitive arms racing, resilient command-and-control systems, alliance cohesion, and the absence of incentives to strike first (high confidence in second-strike survivability). Although experts might weigh dimensions differently, they could work from the same underlying map if key terms are reclaimed and universalized.
Efforts to create such a shared language will require coordinated leadership. Too often, think tanks, national laboratories, and academic centers operate as ideological enclaves, but a coalition-of-the-willing of leading institutions could adopt shared definitions in their analyses, wargames, and policy guidance. A more formal convening, modeled loosely on the IPCC, could bring together government agencies, academic experts, and civil society to produce joint “state of the field” assessments and translate technical debates into public-facing narratives, helping policymakers to navigate contested terrain without demanding false consensus. Funders could reinforce this shift by rewarding synthesis over advocacy: supporting joint fellowships, paired essays, and cross-review panels.
Finally, the nuclear policy field must confront its own attention deficit. A renewed focus on shared terms and collaborative frameworks is not enough if the field continues to operate inside a narrowing expert bubble—not because the number of experts is shrinking (though a growing funding crisis stands to cause this) but because expert discourse circulates largely within itself without public engagement. As I explore in a report for New America’s Future Security Scenarios Lab, public concern about nuclear weapons has steadily eroded, displaced by more proximate fears such as pandemics, cyberattacks, and climate change.
Yet nuclear dangers have not diminished. Russia’s increasingly aggressive nuclear signaling—from battlefield nuclear threats in Ukraine to its suspension of participation in New START inspections and data exchanges—has reintroduced nuclear coercion into day-to-day geopolitics. Meanwhile, Iran continues to accelerate enrichment, harden facilities, and test the limits of international monitoring, creating a regional environment exceptionally prone to miscalculation. Despite fleeting reactive attention spikes, public concern remains low, leaving the expert community to speak urgently into a shrinking civic space.
Fortifying civic attention and engagement will help distribute the burden of awareness. While nuclear risk currently lacks a triggering crisis (thankfully), institutions can design participatory simulations to make abstract dangers visceral. A new National Museum of U.S. Nuclear History and Futures in Washington, D.C., for example, could serve as a civic anchor featuring exhibits on the history of the bomb, national labs, and arms control while offering interactive crisis simulations, public education programs, and even a research library conducive to hosting visiting scholars. Without a wider base of participation and understanding, even well-designed frameworks will struggle to gain traction, and recognition will remain decoupled from action.
The recent uptick in nuclear issues in the news cycle offers an opening for renovation, but it will not last on its own. To convert this moment of curiosity into one of sustained engagement, policymakers and nuclear experts must come together to map boundary concepts, build cross-cutting institutions, and establish accessible venues for citizen engagement. Disagreement is inevitable in a domain defined by uncertainty and competing understandings of what “safety” demands. But goals to protect the nation and humanity itself need not be mutually exclusive. Acting on shared risks—preventing use, reducing escalation, and strengthening control—is a mission broad enough to unite a divided field.
The next generation of nuclear strategy must be plural by design, able to harness disagreement as a source of resilience, not paralysis. The goal is not unity of belief but unity of purpose: keeping nuclear risks visible, debatable, and governable in a fractured world.
